Antivirus and anti-malware tools work by executing a program in the target machine (computing device/computer), which collects data and attempts to detect malicious software. After this, the results are displayed using the target machine peripherals/resources (monitor, etc). However, there are problems with this approach. Firstly, the anti-virus software itself is likely to be the target and/or victim of virus and/or malware, thus unable to fulfill its duty. Secondly, the whole purpose of certain malware is to “sell” anti-malware by displaying messages like “Your computer is infected.” Third, in case of a virtual machine on a machine, a user may have problems distinguishing between the different environments (VMs) residing in a single machine, and could easily be tricked into using a potentially corrupted environment instead of the correct one.
Users can become unlikely to believe the results of malicious software detection that is displayed on the screen, even if such results come from a genuine antivirus tool. One solution for this is to boot the infected machine from a different storage device of the infected machine, such as a CD, or a USB thumb drive, in relation to the hard disk drive (HDD), into a clean state. After that, the user starts scanning the HDD for the malicious software. However, this solution requires certain proficiency with computers, namely rebooting, and further the CD and the USB thumb drive only serve as a reboot function for rebooting the infected machine.